Senses of Style: Poetry before Interpretation

262 Pages·2018·1.138 MB·English

by  Jeff Dolven

s e n s e s
of
s t y l e

s e n s e s
of
s t y l e
poetry before interpretation
J E F F D O LV E N
The University of Chicago Press • Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2017 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and
reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2017
Printed in the United States of America
26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 51708- 7 (cloth)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 51711- 7 (paper)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 51725- 4 (e- book)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226517254.001.0001
The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the University
Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Princeton University toward
the publication of this book.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dolven, Jeffrey Andrew, author.
Title: Senses of style : poetry before interpretation / Jeff Dolven.
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: llcN 2017023893 | ISBN 9780226517087 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226517117
(pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226517254 (e-book)
Subjects: lcSh: Style, Literary. | English poetry—History and criticism. | Wyatt, Thomas, Sir,
1503?–1542. | Wyatt, Thomas, Sir, 1503?–1542—Literary style. | Wyatt, Thomas, Sir, 1503?–
1542—Influence. | O’Hara, Frank, 1926–1966. | O’Hara, Frank, 1926–1966—Literary style.
Classsification: lcc pN203 .D65 2017 | DDc 808—dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017023893
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48- 1992 (Permanence of Paper).
Frontispiece: Joe Brainard and Frank O’Hara, “Untitled (Cherries)” (1964). Ink and collage on
paper, 13 1/2 × 10 3/4 in. Thomas Wyatt’s “If waker care” is the poem in the upper right, in Frank
O’Hara’s handwriting. Used by permission of the Estate of Joe Brainard and the Collection of
Kenneth Koch.
Photograph: Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery.
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Continuing 1
Part and Whole 10
Style v. Substance 38
Art and Nature 58
Style v. Aesthetics 84
Individual and Group 98
Style v. Interpretation 121
Description and Judgment 137
Style v. Narrative 154
Continuing 172
Acknowledgments 185
Notes 189
Bibliography 227
Index 245

PREFACE
Style abhors a preface, if only because style is already here. A few
words of introduction may be useful all the same. Senses of Style is
made up of almost four hundred remarks, ranging in length from
a sentence to a page. Its ambition is to offer an account of liter-
ary style that comprehends the contradictions typically dividing
treatments of the subject; to ground that account in the works
and lives of two poets, Thomas Wyatt and Frank O’Hara; and (a
literary-h istorical pretext, but a real question as well) to explain
the fascination of the second poet with the first.
The book begins and ends with continuing, how style keeps
things going and keeps them from falling apart. In between, it
explores four ironies of style (part and whole, art and nature, in-
dividual and group, description and judgment) and four antithe-
ses of style (substance, aesthesis, interpretation, and narrative).
These shifts of emphasis are recorded in the footer on each page.
The composition, however, is digressive and interruptive; ideas
emerge, subside, and reemerge; the contradictory nature of the
subject is allowed expression as the book’s own self- contradiction.
It attempts to acquaint the reader, as it goes, with the story of each
poet’s life as well as with the sound of his poetry, for style has a way
of reaching out from art into life and back into art again.
The subtitle promises to treat “poetry before interpretation.”
What that claim means will emerge over the following pages, but
it can be said at the outset to derive from a fundamental desire
to distinguish reading for the style from other kinds of reading.
Such a distinction is impossible to maintain as an absolute, and
the blurring of style’s boundaries with those of meaning, or beauty,
or narrative is inevitable. This book is not least an exploration of
the motives for such conflations and confusions. Nonetheless the
claim there are only interpretations is as flattening as the claim
style is everything, and to take either one as dogma is to sacrifice
the distinct prospects afforded by the terms’ mutual indepen-
dence. In that sense, the book might be said to be a critique of style,
in the Kantian sense: an account of the word’s proper limits. But
also an account of when and where the word is useful, and for what
purposes, and what is at stake when its limits are tested, breached,
redrawn. So, a pragmatist critique, if such a thing is possible, and
one that chooses, when it must, philology over philosophy. Style
means how we use it, if it means at all.
The remarks are numbered, and keyed to endnotes that provide
citations, suggest other sources, and sometimes dilate on the re-
mark’s topic. Early modern texts have been quoted from modern-
ized editions. Where those are unavailable, the spelling has been
modernized ad hoc, preserving original punctuation. In a book
about style, that inevitably means a loss in time- feel, but one I
hope is outweighed by the gain in comprehension for the reader
unfamiliar with the vagaries of period orthography. The pervasive
influence of intermediaries such as amanuenses, scribes, and com-
positors on Wyatt’s texts means little is lost of his language, or little
that is not lost already. Titles, as well as early modern sources em-
bedded in modern quotations, are given in their original spelling.
viii Preface
C O N T I N U I N G
§1 Some Preliminary Contradictions
Style holds things together, things and people, schools and move-
ments and periods. It makes us see wholes where we might be be-
wildered by parts.— But it makes us see parts, too. Say you are asked
to identify or describe a style, to account for an act of recognition.
(That sounds like Gertrude Stein, or that looks like a Holbein.) You
might pick out a detail like a figure of speech or a quality of line,
and you might well find a name for it, isocolon or crosshatching.
Style, with all of this specialized language, is manifestly an art, a
technical accomplishment with terms and rules that can be taught
and learned.— Then again, can’t style feel like something you are
simply born with? Something that is in your gait or your hands,
something you couldn’t lose if you tried? A long habit, or even your
nature, whether you like it or not. Style’s idiosyncrasy is the indi-
vidual signature that modernity, and not only modernity, wants
from every great artist.—A nd yet, is it not style that dissolves
the artist into her time, his country or city, her circle of friends?
Everyone and everything has a style, a style that is nothing more
or less than location in social and historical space. None of us can
escape that space, nor could we ever finally want to.—A ll the same,